Lecture 'Perpetual Fluctuation: The Rivers of Bengal as Historical Agents, 1750–1800'

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Bengal's rivers were shifting as they always did. Channels silted, flooded, and abandoned their courses with a regularity that confounded European surveyors and indigenous observers alike.

This paper argues that the instability of Bengal's landscape did not merely complicate the colonial project of cartographic knowledge: it actively shaped the epistemological frameworks through which that knowledge was produced.

Drawing on manuscript surveys, correspondence, and published geographical treatises, Dr. Acosta examines how EIC surveyors, most prominently James Rennell, developed ways of thinking about landscape as dynamic and historically legible rather than fixed and mappable in any final sense.